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Unlike most jobs, we know your work in IT doesn’t just stop when you leave the office.

We don’t mean getting calls from your CEO about his laptop. Parents, kids, friends, neighbors, random strangers who find out what you do for a living… everyone comes to you for computer help.

Two years ago, Sophos released Sophos Home which helped make being everyone’s IT expert that little bit easier. This free, web-based security option let you look after the IT security of the people you care about (or maybe the people who bother you the most to fix their computers – we’re not judging) with a brand that you know always looked out for you as well.

Sophos Home Premium is an upgrade to the already headache-preventing technology available with Sophos Home. The Premium edition includes cutting edge technology from the groundbreaking anti-ransomware, anti-exploit solution, Intercept X.

Ransomware might make the news when it hits huge companies, but it doesn’t discriminate. Your grandmother is as at risk of finding her files locked down by ransomware as a billion-dollar company. And you know who she’s going to call when she gets that terrifying pop-up window asking for cryptocurrency? The same person she calls when she forgets her password. You.

We know how much time and energy you spend keeping your family and friends safe at home. It’s like an entire second career. That’s why Sophos is offering 25% off Sophos Home Premium to Naked Security readers.

New and current Sophos Home users can try out the Premium features for 30-days and then decide to upgrade to Sophos Home Premium or stay with Sophos Home Free. Both versions will continue to receive updates from our engineers and SophosLabs.

It’s all about making the internet safer for everyone – and making your life easier too!

Sophos offers live chat support, email support, and a knowledge base for premium users. Emails and live chats are answered from 9am to 9pm EST, Monday to Friday. The support team aim to respond within 24 hours, but it’s usually much faster than that 🙂 Free users also have access to the knowledge base.

Support for any free product is minimal but I must give credit where credit is due. Sophos does try to help. Most Security products only give you a forum to ask support questions on so any support is hit or miss. If Sophos is honest, you will know that their products are more geared to business. The fact that they do try to support the home user does them credit.

Sophos Home is still free, for Macs and Windows, and it still does everything it used to. For $50 you can switch to Sophos Home Premium and get a product with more features, notably including exploit protection and individual support. You’ll find the details and differences on our website. Errr, that’s about it, really – it’s not a bait and switch: Sophos Home isn’t going away and for many users it will be what they stick with because it already does what they need and want. Others will be happy to pay $50 for the Premium version, and to those people, here it is for 25 bucks :-)

Hi Simon, Sophos Home exists to help drive brand awareness that, in turn, will help to drive business for Sophos channel partners. Online orders of Sophos Home Premium are fulfilled by an ecommerce partner and Sophos B2B channel partners can also sell Sophos Home Premium to their customers if they wish to, through the affiliate partner program.

Is there more information regarding the web management features? I’m guessing management can be done remotely. Where is the management interface and how is that protected?
This sounds like an interesting product. Linux support would be appreciated; I have a few Ubuntu installs around the family.

You don’t need a server of your own for the management features – you get a login to our cloud-based management server from where you look after (and configure) the computers you’ve protected with Sophos Home or Home Premium. (You can protect up to 10 on one subscription, any mix of Macs and Windows.)

Sopbos Anti-Virus for Linux isn’t part of Sophos Home – it’s a separate product of its own – but the good news on Linux is that it’s free *for work as well as at home*:
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-linux.aspx

Well, right now it’d be cheaper :-) Why not try it out? You can install Sophos Home for free, and from there you can try out Premium for 30 days. If you like what you see, you can pay in the $50 and keep Premium or use Home for free; if not, you can stick with the combination you have at the moment.

(Apologies if that advice just tells you *what* you could do, not *why* I personally would recommend one over the other. With a free 30-day test run of Home Premium, however, you’re in a good position to find out what approach you like the best. One neat thing about Home and Premium, BTW, is the fact that there isn’t a separate management console app to install – you just use your browser to log on to our cloud servers. For most home users that’s a very handy situation.)

I use some of my Sophos Home licenses to protect far away elderly relatives’ PCs. If I make the switch to Premium, do the clients automatically get upgraded to Premium as well? If not, is it a process that I can initiate from my console? Just wondering if I need to do this on a visit to the West Coast or from my couch…

AFAIK, after you switch to Premium, the next update your users get will be to Premium. They’ll start off with the settings you’ve chosen in the new GUI options that are available in the console after you switch. So you can do this: pay the $25, review the new options and decide if you want to change any of the defaults for any of your users, and then relax on the couch.

Don’t let that stop you paying your relatives a visit, of course…but you don’t have to go our there to get them upgraded :-)

Beta tested Home Premium and it’s one of the best antiviruses I have ever used. It’s ALMOST perfect for me. It is just a shame it doesn’t do firewall control also so it’s all in one place (and the Windows firewall control panel is pretty awful to use + you have to be ON the pc it’s on). I know you guys do a firewall software that runs on dedicated hardware, but this is faaaaaaar too much effort for a home user (plus I’d have to have dedicated hardware at each of my families homes which would be expensive).

I recommend it to all that don’t want to pay for an antivirus but also recommend the premium it to people as it’s good value for money.

Strictly speaking, our official licensing treats Sophos Home (there’s a Free version as well as the Premium version) as a consumer product, where we define consumer as “an individual acting for purposes that are wholly or mainly outside that individual’s trade, business, craft or profession.” (Those are the lawyers’ words, not mine :-)

In other words, if you use your computer mainly for work, you’re supposed to buy one of our business products, e.g. Sophos Central. It’s more expensive, because it’s a business licence, but you do get more for your money, including a higher level of support. You can try it for 30 days free of charge here: